Camden Fringe Review, TAPE ★★★½

What is truth? Who owns the truth? And, as we grow up, how harshly should we judge our younger selves? And, if we decide our younger self deserves some grace, do we give everyone else’s younger self that same compassion? These are big questions especially in an era where so many choices young people may go on to regret are caught on camera or on twitter feeds to never be escaped.

Stephen Belber’s new play Tape, as part of the Camden Fringe Festival, asks these questions in an intimate three-hander all set in a hotel room in Michigan. Here, everyone believes they are a reliable narrator but none of the stories match. It is set in the 1990s, hence the name Tape (referring to a vital cassette tape in the story) but it is intriguing how pertinent the questions feel to both then and now.

We open in a slightly unsavoury hotel room with Vince (Paul Kelvin) cutting lines of cocaine. He is in a seedy vest and looks fairly unkempt. We discover later he makes his money drug dealing in California.

He is here to join his friend, former nerd, Jon (Nick Chinn) who has found some success and is now a socially interested filmmaker in town for his film premier. He still has some way to go, Lansing is not quite Cannes. When Jon arrives, his shoes, blazer and hair cut initially suggest he has had greater success but it becomes clear this is built on some shaky emotional foundations. Vince soon has his confident exterior crumbling and his high school self doubt creeping back as he challenges him on his world views and, ultimately, on one key night when they were in high school.

Kelvin captures Vince and his manipulation well though I would have been interested to know why, after ten years, he had chosen now to raise concerns. Vince is a person who is happy to judge others and more than content to drag them down to his gutter. He presents his examination of Chinn as selfless and in support of their shared ex-girlfriend Amy (Britanny Rex) but this too is one of the many ambiguities of the show. If Vince is such a champion of Amy’s right to sexual choice, did he remember to check what Amy’s choice actually was?

The play is at its strongest when we see people grappling with their consciences and trying to understand their teen choices with their now adult brains. The ambiguity is a strength as it underlines the message that we can all have hugely different interpretations of the same events.

Where it weakens a little is when it tries to answer some of the questions it raises. It may have been stronger if it left us with three mismatched stories. Sometimes in life there is no one definitive answer.

The staging all in one hotel room works effectively and it is plausible to believe this all happened in one hotel room over one night, though after both Jon and Amy’s arrivals, the dive into deeper issues feels a little rushed. There is some genuinely funny humour in amongst the darker scenes, an attempt to flush things down the sink particularly caught the audience’s fancy.

The fight scenes were also well staged and added entertainment to the evening. They captured well the scuffle of old friends not used to fighting.

All told, this is a well-performed show evening that leaves much to discuss on the way home.

TAPE continues at the Lion and the Unicorn theatre each night at 7 pm until 15th August 2026.

Read our interview with the TAPE team here.

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